Plagiarism allegations shouldn't be forgotten

DORIS Kearns Goodwin, a prolific American political historian and former Harvard professor, is coming to speak in Layton, courtesy of the Davis School District and the Davis Education Foundation. For a number of years, Goodwin has been represented by the Washington Speakers Bureau, earning $25,000 to $39,999 per lecture. Her Utah lecture will probably net her somewhere in that neighborhood.

That bothers me, because The Weekly Standard reported in January 2002 that evidence strongly suggested that Goodwin plagiarized extensively in several of her books. The most serious instances, at least 40 borrowed passages, were found to be in her 900 page book, "The Kennedys and the Fitzgeralds" (1987).

The Los Angeles Times reported that plagiarism was also involved in the book that won her a Pulitzer Prize, "No Ordinary Time."

Webster's dictionary says that plagiarism is "to steal and pass off as one's own the ideas or words of another — or "to commit literary theft."

Richard Posner in his new book, "The Little Book of Plagiarism," writes, "Plagiarism is considered by most writers, teachers, journalists, scholars and even members of the general public to be the capital intellectual crime."

In his 1989 book, "Stolen Words," novelist Thomas Mallon alleges that those who commit plagiarism "almost always do it more than once." Mallon added that kidnapping a writer's words "is to find them imprisoned, like changelings, on someone else's equally permanent page ... vicariously absorbed by violation."

Goodwin's tendency to steal the words of others was actually discovered 15 years earlier when Lynne McTaggart, author of "Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and Times," found that Goodwin had taken huge amounts of her words and phrases without attributing them to McTaggart.

When Goodwin was confronted, she agreed to pay McTaggart an undisclosed sum of "hush money" so that the incident would not be made public. McTaggart argued that the thievery of her words was so massive that she thought it impossible for a new edition of Goodwin's book to be printed with quotation marks added.

Many examples of Goodwin's account as compared to McTaggart's were published in newspapers and magazines so that the reader could see that the words and phrases used by Goodwin were often exact copies of those used by McTaggart.

Goodwin's argument when confronted was to blame it on her "careless" habit of "taking notes in longhand." In other words, it was accidental. She worked with an assembly line of four researchers, and allegedly, when she looked at their notes and her own, she could not always distinguish between them.